 EMPIRES OF SAND
David Ball, 1999
Buckle your swash, it's a rip-roaring adventure set in 1870s French Sahara as two cousins, parted by circumstance and ideology in their homeland, meet again as adversaries on the shifting sands of the pitless desert. It's easy to scoff at these sorts of epics, but when they have a historical and geographical authenticity (think Bagley's Flyaway or Asher's Sandstorm but not Cussler's Sahara or Shukman below) you get to learn a whole lot while being entertained.
Unfortunately this book went
MIA just as I was getting to the desert and now
I'm too busy to find another copy.
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SANDSTORM
Henry Shukman, 2005
With its over-obvious title (there's another 'Sandstorm' below) and gushing back cover reviews of the author's previous book, Sandstorm nevertheless looked promising. It's the tale of Mortimer, a once lauded war correspondent now down on his luck, banging out resto reviews. Then one morning in a New York bar he reads an obituary to a French photo journalist, the beautiful Celeste Dumas (has there ever been a butt-ugly French photo-j?). Flashback: Algeria 1976 and their shared adventure and fleeting romance as they broke the news of a Tuareg uprising - a story which launched Mortimer's international career (but not their romance, to his everlasting regret) until a defining event much later in the same country brings about his professional crash.
The start offers some suspense as the lovers head south into the desert on the trail of this great scoop. We soon tick off the obligatory "water... water..." scenario in the dunes - but then, the actual event which was set to explode on the world's front pages passes by before you notice so that I had to flick back, convinced that some pages were missing. From that point onward it was difficult to empathise with Mortimer's dire need to wire in his groundbreaking story (a feeble 'foreign-oil-company-funds-Tuareg-fight-for-homeland-in-return-for-oil-rights strand might have been pinched off Clive Cussler himself). In the meantime Celeste's uncertain feelings for Mort are hinted at as well as her ambivalence towards their seemingly glamourous and important work. After surviving a near-drowning off the western Saharan coast, Mortimer sets his sights for fame and glory but can't persuade the still-traumatised Celeste to come with - she just wants to go back home to photograph lambs.
Flash forward 18 years (not 15 as the jacket says) and Pulitzer-prize winning Mort finds himself back in Algiers covering some riots, but the 'great error of his professional life' is another feebly shallow scenario cooked up off the cuff - though tellingly used to explain how modern sat video feeds have superceded the old hack dictating his typewritten story into a phone.
We hear that Shukman is an award winning poet and this novel was expanded from a short story, but Sandstorm seems hampered by its 'luvey' literary genre; the low-brow adventure element doesn't marry with lovelorn Mortimer's supposed cynicism and subsequent moral failure. It is telling of the author's grasp of the region, its people and history that, in his book, the newspapers describe the revolt as "the most romantic war of the half-century". Has any 20th-C conflict ever been described so? The reasoning behind the displacement of real Algerian place names is also unclear (one assumes the action is happening around real-life Tindouf, miles from Tuareg country) and the muddling of real historical events is confusing - though maybe only to those who know of them. The location of the real Saharawi wars of the Western Sahara in the 1970s becomes a more bibliogenic Tuareg rebellion which never happened (at least not for 15 years, and then in Niger and Mali). The desert is rendered with more purple than a bishop in a mangle and one has to ask, is the renaming of the real Rio de Oro as 'Rio Camellio' a joke - and how long did it take to cook up 'Food International' as an aid agency name? About as long as the 'great error of his professional life'.
Sandstorm turns out as lame as a three-legged camellio with concussion.
Guardian review
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 THE BLEEDING OF THE STONE
Ibrahim Al-Koni, 2003
The Libyan Tuareg author, Ibrahim Al-Koni, tells the tale of Asouf, a solitary goatherd who is, as it happens, the guardian of Wadi Mathendous. The similarly reclusive mouflon (barbary sheep or waddan) feature heavily and symbolically. His father died trying to hunt a mouflon, and Asouf once escaped from the Italian occupiers by changing into a mouflon and heading for the hills. One day aggressive modern hunters (one of them telling named Cain) come to Wadi Mat', insisting he leads them to any remaining mouflon in the Messak.
One presumes there is some kind of allegory being played out here. Cain is a voracious meat-eater. Asouf is a veggie. One is the incomer ravaging the desert, the other lives very humbly, at one with the environment. Nice though it is to read something in English by an indigenous writer of the Sahara, and even a Tuareg, the themes were not that subtly evoked and I spent more time picturing the well-known Fezzanese settings than acquiring any deeper meaning other than: nomads - good; modern man - bad. But don't take my word for it - readers with better tuned sensitivities may get the message.
Maybe also reviewed soon, Ibrahim Al-Koni's new book Anubis: A Desert Novel.
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 SANDSTORM
Micheal Asher, 2004
Michael Asher's thriller is set in the Spanish Sahara of 1953 when, shortly before being garrotted, a mysterious stranger informs a grieving father in the UK that his son, Billy, survived a plane crash over the desert seven years earlier.
Both father (as well as more sinister agents) then set off in search of the boy who has since been brought up as a Reguibat warrior-hunter, because Billy holds the clues to the location of buried Nazi gold…
By p.27 you pretty much know how the yarn will pan out - maybe that's the idea with these books - and the final showdown in the quicksands is statistically a little far-fetched and unsatisfying. Nevertheless the journey to this point is entertaining and informative. Asher bestows the Reguibat (a Moorish tribe of Yemeni origins who make up today's Saharawi people in Western Sahara) with many of the better qualities and customs of the Bedu of Arabia with whom the author spent many years.
Untypically, Stirling, the boy's father is a pacifist who did time for his beliefs during WWII, while the baddies are not all scar-faced Nazis, but include other figures closer to home. The real heroes of course are the proud and honour-bound Reguibat nomads who despise our flabby and crass Western values. Like his mentor Thesiger, Asher cannot resist painting them as noble nomadic raiders wanting nothing more than peace with the despicable neighbouring tribes. At one point the 'bats join forces with the pagan, dog-hunting Nemadi (also a real if extinct tribe, and a long way from Nema, it seems) and there is an amusing exchange tinged with truth when Muslim and pagan nomads belittle eachothers' customs, language and dress.
The big themes in Sandstorm are betrayal, courage and loyalty among nomads and westerners alike - 'honour' in a word - and in telling its tale, Sandstorm avoids the worst cringe-making cliches of this genre (on which I'm not an expert) while opening a window on a little known people and part of the Sahara. It compares well with Desmond Bagley's Flyaway and is of course much better than Cussler's dreadful Sahara. Asher generously credits John Mercer's Spanish Sahara for much of his information - this book is reviewed here.
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 SHELTERING SKY
Paul Bowles (Penguin)
A cult novel by the Tangiers literary guru based on the author's own experiences in North Africa. Not a thoughtful gift for a nervy visitor to Morocco, but a thrilling read if you like your desert with a bit of sex, madness, infidelity and death. Bertolucci's eponymous 1985 film turned out to be a hackneyed desert romance with dashing Tuareg princes, graceful caravans crossing golden dunes and ululating tribes women at every village. While certainly good looking (filmed partly in the Tenere), it fails to get it's teeth into the inscrutable, existential quandaries of the protagonists. Although he appeared in one of the final scenes, Paul Bowles had this to say of the film: It should never have been filmed. The ending is idiotic and the rest is pretty bad. The track from the Police's Synchronicity album, Tea in the Sahara, relates a morbid legend described in this book.
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 FLYAWAY
Desmond Bagley (House of Stratus)
Geographically authentic, fast-paced thriller set in the Hoggar, Tenere and Tassili of the central Sahara. This is Tintin for grown-ups, where laconic heroes like Burne say "what the hell…" a lot and casually swap diffs' during sandstorms while chased by mysterious assassins. Women are usually somewhere else and "strangely attractive". Compulsively entertaining departure lounge stuff. By comparison, Clive Cussler's similarly adventuresome Sahara is a load of implausible crap with a feeble eco-message. It's easily unfinishable and a waste of a good title. Don't believe me? Check out these amazon reviews.
And as for Sahara - the film (doubtless on dvd by now) - it gives a jokey James Bond/Indiana Jones take on the absurd caper because, one assumes, no other style was possible. Treasure hunter Dirt Pitt - unwittingly bringing to mind the Steve Zissou character in The Life Aquatic - jets up the Niger River in a speedboat with sidekicks Steve Zahn and another bloke to locate a long-lost ironclad battleship from the American Civil War which managed to end up the Malian Sahara (it was pre-GPS, after all).
Meanwhile dedicated WHO doctor Penelope Cruz (who can't quite summon the unselfconscious gusto of the US cast) also wants to get into war-torn Mali to investigate the source of a plague which could contaminate the whole planet and bring about the end of life as we know it.
I won't spoil your film by telling you that, with the guys' help she saves the planet, they find the treasure, the put-upon 'Tuaregs' (horse-mounted no less) overcome the tank corps, the baddies get shafted and Dirk ends up frolicking with Penny in the Californian surf.
Shot in Spain and Morocco (with some cg backgrounds), it has to be said the locations look good. Morocco really is not bad at all and the action sequences are as good as they get. Matthew McWhatever lacks Cruz's embarrassment at the production and his sidekick Steve Zahn is funny. What always gets me is the huge amount of work it must take to produce such a mass of quivering tripe, with split-second cuts piled on top of eachother like an expresso pop video, and lashings of SFX, DFX and FX-knows what, but all for such an truly lame script. Maybe it's for kids but it seems to parody itself, not least when, after trekking across the dunes handcuffed to a pick-up tray, the duo come across a crashed plane and deftly convert it into a sand yacht. Just like the book then, a waste of a good title and as deserty films go, I thought the recent remake of Flight of the Phoenix (set in Mongolia this time, but shot in Namibia) was better.
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 THE LOST TRAIL OF THE SAHARA
R Frison Roche, 1956 (o/p)
Translated by none other than Paul Bowles (see Sheltering Sky, below), Lost Trail is a fictional Saharan adventure by an explorer and mountaineer who travelled extensively in the desert before the war. In the 1930a he led an expedition to make the first ascent of Garet El Djenoun in the Tefedest.
It tells the tale of Beaufort, a rookie soldier sent out into the Saharan summer on a long and dangerous mission to track down a renegade Tuareg, Akou, accused of murder. Beaufort is accompanied by a scientist Lignac to provide a cover story for the mission, and the band of conscripts and local guides, both Tuareg and Chaamba, who make up the caravan which reaches out from the Hoggar into the then unknown northern Tenere.
Misfortunes, both random and sinister befall the caravan, as suspicions grow that the wily Tuareg know more than they admit about the location of Akou. Predations weigh down the convoy which eventually is singlehandedly ambushed by Akou and his wicked accessory, Tmara. But, providence wins the day, the baddies are vanquished, some of the goodies are sacrificed, though the book ends rather ambiguously with the remainder of the caravan truding ever deeper into the Tenere to see what they might find. A rather lame subplot about Lignac, slowly uncovering a lost Phoenecian trade route acros the Tenere (akin to the real Garamantean chariot route) gives the book its title.
Frison's yarn has an authentic frisson one might say, written by a Saharan of the desert born, a fact whichwhich, like Asher's Sandstorm below, always makes such books endurable to those few who know the region. What is particularly interesting, especially for a Frenmchman, is the light he casts on the Tuaregs and their long-time enemies, the Chaambi Arabs of the north. The former come across as sly and untrustworthy while the Arabs are painted in more rosey hues, possessing the traditional virtues one associates wirh nomads. One do wonder if Frison's fiction was coloured by real life experiences, 70 years ago. Listed from £7 (up to £250!) on abebooks. |
